Louise Casey's report into Rotherham council's failure to address child sexual
exploitation in the town discovers an organisation still in denial about the
extent of the problem

Rotherham Council is an organisation still “in denial” about its total failure to protect 1,400 girls from child sexual exploitation, a devastating government report said.

Louise Casey, who was asked to carry out an inspection of the council by the Department for Communities and Local Government, found that staff did not accept the findings of an independent inquiry carried out by Professor Alexis Jay last year.

Council workers believed there had not been a problem and that “the media were out to get them”.

In truth, said Ms Casey, a culture of bullying, political correctness, incompetence and cover-up had allowed gangs of Asian men to get away with child abuse for years.

Ms Casey said 70 per cent of councillors disputed Professor Jay’s findings, with one saying: “I thought it was probably the worst report I had read in my life. It was full of innuendo, supposition, it made statements not based on evidence; it just didn’t make sense.”

Others told inspectors that while they were aware there was a problem with child sexual exploitation (CSE), they had never realised the scale of it.

Describing the attitude she encountered, when speaking to Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council staff, Ms Casey said: “If there was a problem they certainly were not told – it was someone else’s job. They were no worse than anyone else. They had won awards.”

When the issue was highlighted in media reports in 2012, councillors dismissed the coverage as politically motivated attacks by the right-wing media.

But the inspectors said they were in no doubt that the “numbers of victims and the type and extent of the CSE problem was clear to the council”.

Miss Casey said throughout the scandal, the council had been more concerned with the potential for reputational damage, rather than with the plight of the victims of CSE.

Political correctness

Rotherham’s Labour-run council was portrayed in the report as an authority where political correctness persistently blighted its approach to CSE.

The South Yorkshire town has a small Pakistani community, accounting for around three per cent of the local population.

But the report found that when the council was presented with information that men from this community were involved in the grooming and abuse of young white girls, there was a reluctance to address the issue for fear of being labelled racist.

One former council officer told the inspectors: “Rotherham isn’t a very PC place, I think that is why the Council overcompensated too much.

“It doesn’t want to be accused of being racist. Perpetrators have been known to say ‘I’ll use the racecard’.”

But Ms Casey said political correctness had not only allowed perpetrators to get away with appalling crimes, but had also allowed the far right to flourish.

Her report stated: “Rotherham’s suppression of these uncomfortable issues and its fear of being branded racist has done a disservice to the Pakistani heritage community as well as the wider community.

“It has prevented discussion and effective action to tackle the problem. This has allowed perpetrators to remain at large, has let victims down, and perversely, has allowed the far right to try and exploit the situation.

“It seems that with an intention of not being racist, their ways of dealing with race does more harm than good.”

Louise Casey, who led a team which conducted an inspection into Rotherham's child sexual exploitation (PA)

Bullying and Sexism

The report found widespread allegations of bullying and sexism. Former leader Roger Stone and former deputy leader Jahangir Akhtar were both accused of inappropriate behaviour by staff at the council.

The report quoted one councillor saying: “[Roger Stone is] a bully in my opinion. In Labour group he would impress himself on people, male or female. A lot of women have felt a sense of suppression and macho culture.”

One former senior officer, quoted in the report said: “What Stone said, went. Everyone was terrified of Stone.”

Referring to Mr Akhtar, the report said when he pleaded guilty to affray following an incident in a restaurant in 2003, he temporarily stepped aside, but there was little debate about whether he was a fit and proper person to be a councillor.

One councillor said: “The whole ‘stepping aside’ thing seemed a bit of a fudge. No special meeting was called. There was a Members’ meeting that he was present at. After the police investigation he just popped back – there was no discussion.”

Giving an example of the sexist culture that existed within the council, one officer claimed a former Mayor of Rotherham had told him: “In his year of mayoral office it was his right to kiss all the pretty ladies in the office. I remember thinking, ‘This is so Rotherham’.”

What were the police doing?

South Yorkshire Police was accused of treating victims of child sex abuse as the guilty parties in many cases, regarding them as “little slags” who lured older men into having sex with them.

Girls were threatened with wasting police time, told they had consented to sex (even sex with a minor is illegal in any circumstances) and on some occasions they were arrested at the scene of a crime, rather than the perpetrators.

One police officer casually told a victim: “Don’t worry- you aren’t the first girl to be raped by XX and you won’t be the last.”

One witness said: “They didn’t understand the situation, and thought that the girls were happy, or complicit in it. The sense was that if there had been any offence it had been by the girls, for luring the men in.”

Even when evidence and intelligence was available, police did not follow it through. Five men were convicted of CSE but another 80 perpetrators were identified. One officer tried to take the case on, but was told by a superior: “We’ve got to cut it off somewhere.”

When police did try to act, by accessing social care files, they were told they could not have them because of Data Protection laws and had to obtain them by submitting Freedom of Information requests.

Why predatory taxi drivers were allowed to get away with it

Political correctness protected abusers because council officers were reluctant to revoke their taxi licences when they were accused of sexual abuse.

“Some officers and Members felt they could not raise matters relating to Pakistani heritage taxi drivers and perpetrators because of community cohesion implications,” the report says.

The council knew of reports of children being used for sex in exchange for free rides, vodka, cigarettes or food from taxi drivers, and of drivers picking up girls outside their school so they could perform sex acts on them during their lunchbreak.

But the Director of Housing and Neighbourhood Services, responsible for taxi licensing, said that four revocations of licences in 2009 to 2012 represented the “full extent of taxi driver child sexual abuse in Rotherham”.

The council’s former deputy leader, Jahangir Akhtar, was a former taxi driver who “made representations on behalf of taxi drivers to speed up the issue of licences in advance of Criminal Record Bureau checks”, the report said. Some members and officers felt “intimidated” by him and said he had made threats, though he denies it.

The whistle-blowers who were silenced

The council had a “culture of covering up uncomfortable truths, silencing whistle-blowers and paying off staff rather than dealing with difficult issues”, the report said.

One whistleblower told the inspectors: “We’ve all been made aware of the (whistleblowing) procedure, but no one dares ever use it, because if they did, eventually it would come back to bite them in the backside and they would be bullied out of the organisation”.

The inspectors found that key files were missing and could not be provided, but when they were given tips on where the files might be found they were quickly tracked down.

“It seems that when RMBC says things are missing and lost, they may not have looked that hard,” the report said.

In 2011 the council told police about the theft of 21 laptops which contained up to half of all the data on children held by the council, though there was no sign of a break-in. The council also failed to inform the Information Commissioner that sensitive data had gone missing.

The report concludes that the council “did cover up the scale of the loss known at the time”.

One whistleblower who lost their job after speaking out said: “The machine at RMBC doesn’t care, won’t listen and simply exists to cover up and destroy.”